Ao – An Elegant Microsoft Todo Desktop App

We already have written about few command line todo apps such as Taskwarrior, Kanban.bash and Terminal Velocity. Today, we are going to discuss about a graphical todo application. Say hello to “Ao”, an elegant microsoft todo desktop app. It is an unofficial, featureful, free, open source and community-driven todo app that is being used by people around the world.

Installing Ao

Ao is available in AUR. The Arch users can install it using any AUR helpers.

Ao is also available as snap. For those who are using Snap, run the following command to install it.

$ snap install ao

Ao is available for different distributions. Go to the releases page and download the suitable installer for your distribution.

Usage

Once installed, launch it from menu or application launcher. You will be asked to sign in to your microsoft account. Yes, you should have a free microsoft account to use this app. The good thing is it lets you to create an account (if you don’t have one already) in the app itself. You don’t need to register using a web browser.

This is how Ao default interface looks like.

As you can see, the interface is simple, clean and user-friendly. You can change the theme if you don’t like the default one. To change the theme, go to View -> Toggle Theme from menu bar. There are three themes available namely Sepia, Dark and Black.

Create a to-do

To add a new to-do, navigate to To-Do section in the left pane. Click on “Add a to-do” button, type the title and click ADD.

Similarly, you can create as many to-dos as you want. Double click on the to-do to display additional section which allows you to set reminder, due date and a note about the to-do. You can also assign the newly to-do to current day by clicking on the button that says “Add to My Day” to complete the task today itself.

Once you completed the to-do, just click on round check box behind the name of the to-do to mark it as completed.

The to-dos can be sorted by due date, creation date, and alphabetically. To sort the to-dos, click on the three dots next to the to-do. A drop-down menu will appear. Go to Sort and sort them as you wish.

Delete a to-do

To delete a to-do, just double click on it and hot the trash can button at the bottom.

Creating lists

You can create separate lists, such as official or personal, to add different to-dos. To create a new list, click on New list option from the left pane and enter the name of the list.

You can even share this list to someone to collaborate. Anyone with to the shared list can view and modify the contents of that list. To share a list, simply click on the + sign next to the list and click “Create Invitation Link”.

Copy the link address and send it to someone who wish to contribute. Once the new collaborators joined, you can view them in the following screen.

To stop sharing the list, click on More Options in the above screen and then click Stop Sharing button.

Mange your account

To manage your account, click on the icon before your name in the dashboard and click “Settings” button.

From here, you can,

Import your lists and to-dos from wunderlist,

Enable/disable reminder notifications,

Enable/disable context menus,

Turn on/off to-do completion sound,

and many.

Keyboard shortcuts

Ao supports 40+ local keyboard shortcuts and 3 global shortcuts, so you can toggle between anything in a flash. The local keyboard allows to manage lists/to-dos,adjust change fonts, switch between themes, add due date, set reminder, toggle window menu and full screen.

The global shortcuts helps you to access Ao at any moment from anywhere within your operating system. All global shortcuts can be customized to match your own preference through the configuration file ~/.ao.json. To reset the keyboard settings to default, simply delete the ao config file from your home directory.

And, that’s all for now. Hope this was useful. I will be soon here another guide. Until then, stay tuned with OSTechNix.